Shore leave at Yosemite Park is cut short by a hostage situation on the planet Nimbus III, where a Vulcan named Sybok has taken three ambassadors hostage. The Enterprise is dispatched to resolve the situation, and they find that Sybok is Spock’s fully Vulcan half-brother. He has a unique ability to purge a person’s pain, a neat trick that both Spock and McCoy take him up on (Kirk refuses, saying his pain makes him human). Unfortunately, Sybok also happens to be a raving cultist in search of god at the planet Sha Ka Ree in the center of the universe. Meanwhile, a Klingon named Klaa is in pursuit of Kirk, for personal glory and because the movie needed explosions.

The Enterprise, followed by Klaa’s ship, makes it to the center of the universe and the mythical Sha Ka Ree. On the surface Sybok calls out to his god, who seems much more interested in procuring himself a ship than offering spiritual experiences. Kirk is suspicious, and when he refuses to bring the ship closer the god-alien attacks them all. Chases ensue, Sybok sacrifices himself to stop the god-alien, some transporter hijinks ensue, and in the end Starfleet and the Klingons make friends and let murder-crazed bygones be bygones.

Also god is dead.

Analysis

If you use your imagination, this is a good movie.

So many elements have potential. Any one aspect of the film could have been enough: an emotional Vulcan. Spock’s half-brother. The supporting cast falling for a non-Kirk charismatic leader. God. But no, Star Trek V had to have it all, and the result is a singularly odious mélange cobbled together by ambitious hacks.

It doesn’t even have the charm of workman-like mediocrity. The script is awful: stiff dialogue that tells instead of shows, ludicrously out-of-character laugh lines, and puns not even worthy of a superhero movie. I’m used to bad puns–Eugene is one of the worst offenders–but my god, people. Every time one of those lines comes out, I feel like the writers are drunk at dinner, poking me and everyone else in the audience in the ribs with a fork. “Get it?? Gravity of the situation? Drop in for dinner?” Then they guffaw loudly at their own brilliance before passing out in a pool of their own shame. (At least, that’s how it plays out in my hopeful imagination. In reality they all got fat paychecks, I’m sure.) To make matters worse, all of this is propped up by atrocious special effects, incongruous sound effects, and weirdly inappropriate music. I know they were broke, but the original series looks better than this, in no small part because of competent directors and designers. Everything about TFF looks and feels cheap, especially the new bridge.

But you don’t even know what you’re in for when the movie begins. I have always liked the opening, with the ringwraith and the hillbilly meeting in the desert. (But what kind of ringwraith rides a unicorn?) It’s intriguing and mysterious! The concept of Nimus III isn’t without merit, either. The “Planet of Galactic Peace” is a great setting for any war movie. Unfortunately, it winds up going into an extended bar joke. (A Romulan, a Klingon, and a Human walk into a bar. A cat-woman pole-dances. The Romulan says, “It appears I’ve arrived just in time!”) I wish I could say you can’t make this shit up, but someone actually did and that makes me immeasurably sad. Eventually you realize that the entire planet’s existence was conceived not to make use of its political possibilities, but so that Sybok can easily kidnap three utterly irrelevant dignitaries without making more than one stop.

The plot is utter nonsense, and I think even Shatner probably would’ve owned up to that. There are no experienced commanders around? Really? Much of what happens is determined by the transporters not working. And ye gods, the fan dance. They are the brightest and most daring group of Starfleet officers the Federation has ever seen–and that’s the best they can do? I don’t even have to get into how squicky it is that they’re baiting a bunch of desert barbarians with sex for it to be degrading to everyone involved. These characters are idiots and they deserve to be captured when they are.

And those idiots are the real focus of the movie. I think Shatner was trying to push the characters in a new direction: to give depth and context to these people we’ve known for twenty years. A peek into each of their private lives was probably long overdue. Unfortunately, in Shatner’s hands, their private lives were pretty much exactly like their public ones (except for Scotty and Uhura, which the less said about, the better). On shore leave, the holy trinity don’t seem to mingle with their subordinates. Sulu and Chekov are best friends, which I guess makes sense since they never really interact with anyone else onscreen. It reinforces what we’ve seen a hundred times without actually teaching us anything interesting or new about these people. So what’s the point?

Sybok is supposed to come in and change all that. We learn that McCoy is this tortured soul who feels extreme guilt for his father’s death. This still doesn’t work for me. I’ve always gotten the sense that McCoy carries a bitterness with him. He’s not uncaring or unkind, but he has very resolute ideas of right and wrong, and I get the sense that he’s been wronged more times than he’s been righted. The backstory he gets doesn’t fit–I can’t even figure out what it’s trying to show about him. Was he supposed to be unmerciful and let his father suffer? Is that really the regret he has? Being a doctor means making the best decision you can given all the information you have, and he did that. Or is it just supposed to show that life is unfair and McCoy (of all people!) has never managed to live with that? It’s arbitrary and confusing, and time after time I feel nothing at this so-called pain.

The line that bothers me most is Sybok’s statement to Kirk that “this is who [your friends] are. Didn’t you know that?” Kirk should know this. They are best friends. And McCoy should know himself, as Spock knows himself. Spock knows who he is and what’s important to him, and has made the decision to let those things go that need to be let go. If McCoy doesn’t confess his guilt in the dead of night to these people, chances are he doesn’t harbor much of it. The rest of the crew that’s so easily swayed should all be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun. I mean what’s Uhura’s regret? Agreeing to go on a date with Scotty?

As for Shatner, well, I forgive him: this movie isn’t his fault, not entirely. Sure he gave Kirk a supernatural resist against brainwashing attacks, but that’s nothing new: Kirk is always the One Guy Who Can Take It. Kirk’s the hero but he’s always the hero, and Shatner actually pays more lip service to the other characters than he needed to for the story to work. The fact that it doesn’t work isn’t because Kirk is the ego-maniacal focus–it’s because there is no focus. The film tries too hard at too many different things and manages to do all of them poorly. It’s easy to dismiss this movie as an ego trip, but Shatner was thinking bigger than himself, and even bigger than Kirk. I don’t begrudge him that and his reputation as the maligned franchise-killer isn’t deserved. With a good script, or even a good editor, I think Shatner could have made a good movie.

The real soul of this film, if there is one at all, is Kirk’s remark that he needs his pain. This is classic Star Trek, a recurring theme from “This Side of Paradise” to “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” Pain makes us human, and humanity is essential. What good are the highs without the lows? What makes joy or happiness meaningful but the absence of it? But it’s an idea too nuanced for such hamfisted writing and directing, and they would have been better off not mucking about with it at all.

Instead, we get a fake god that makes whale noises and shoots lightning from his eyes. That’s a pain I definitely don’t need.

Torie’s Rating: Warp 1

Eugene Myers: Though there is some debate over the merits of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, few fans will claim that The Final Frontier is a good film. It isn’t. But for a while, I flirted with the idea of defending it as such, at least until I re-watched it; I had this strange impulse not because I had forgotten how bad the movie is, but because I remember its better aspects more–clinging to them like a shipwrecked sailor holds fast to driftwood. And TFF does have its good moments.

“The hell it does,” you say.

The high points of TFF are frontloaded in the film, then appear few and far between, but they exist as surely as God does at the center of the universe. Almost all of these moments are character-oriented scenes, or brief exchanges between the main cast, and often they work because of the history of the show, the skills of the actors, and their chemistry together. In other words, they succeed despite the script, which is generally poor. Okay, it’s awful, with most of the dialogue relying on punnish superhero quips that even I couldn’t enjoy.

The dialogue is so bad, I had attributed one of my favorite lines to a different movie, somehow forgetting that Klingons are in TFF, though they certainly have no reason to be. (They’re a weak and misguided attempt to present a danger to Enterprise, before becoming a convenient deus ex machina at the conclusion—again. And annoyingly, the Starfleet crew’s favorable reaction to their new allies directly, all in the name of humor, contradicts their prejudiced interactions in the next film.)

“Please, sir, not in front of the Klingons” is one of the better lines because of the familiarity forged between Kirk and Spock over nearly twenty-five years of history together. Similarly, the Chekov and Sulu scene where they’re lost in Yosemite is classic in every sense of the word. In fact, most of the characters are fairly faithful to the ones we’ve seen in the past three films…until the mind control. But even Sybok’s weird influence is no explanation for the forced romantic interest between Uhura and Scotty, which had never been hinted at before—and thankfully never again since.

That’s the biggest flaw in this film: how forced it all is. Characters do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do and the hand of the screenwriters is felt manipulating the thin plot just as Sybok manipulates his cult of followers. The action sequences are contrived; almost all of them result because the most brilliant engineer in Starfleet can’t get the damn transporters to work, or even navigate an access corridor without knocking himself out.

Spock acts even more out of character, threatening to undo all the hard work of the previous movie to reestablish his usual awesomeness. There seems to be a constant struggle over whose movie this is—Kirk’s or Spock’s—which leads to an entire lack of investment in any of the coherent character development and makes it all seem rather aimless and pointless.

TFF and TMP share more than just a great soundtrack—TFF seems to suffer from some of the same flaws as TMP, primarily an overdone idea that never really worked all that well in the original series. (A whole host of derivative ideas, actually: another “paradise” that is really not, a “great barrier” in space, and an inexplicable electrical storm in space.) No wonder Kirk questions God—he’s seen all this before. After an engaging opening that sets up some political intrigue, the story becomes a slow march toward a twist ending that surprises no one. The plot and conflicts that crop up are as artificial as the alien being on Sha Ka Ree—which is itself a big joke.

Once again, why Kirk needs to be involved is never clear. Depressing as it is to accept, he’s the most experienced captain in the Fleet, which makes him uniquely qualified to… What? Blunder into a trap? Get ridden by an angry catwoman? Allow his ship to be taken over for the umpteenth time by a Vulcan mystic and malnourished rabble armed with Supersoakers?

Kirk does manage to bluff “God” at the end, so that’s at least an improvement over his ineffectual contributions to the V’Ger debacle. I wish I knew what Sybok accomplished by using his power on the being, though, other than committing suicide. (Incidentally, his final scene reminded me of one of my most painful Star Trek memories: “The Alternative Factor.”)

Add in some unusually bad special effects, and TFF is just a mess of a movie. If I had to pick the worst moment in the film, it may have to be Sybok’s lecturing Kirk, Spock, and McCoy—space explorers, for crying out loud—about fearing the unknown. If someone had just read the script over once, they should have been able to pick that out as utterly ludicrous.

Personally, I never minded the flashbacks to McCoy’s and Spock’s most painful memories (let’s not entertain the logistics of the latter even being possible). I like expanding their history onscreen and adding some emotional depth, if you could call it that, but the fact that Spock and McCoy are able to shake off mind control out of loyalty to their captain undermines Sybok’s entire schtick. And it’s insulting to assume that any one moment, any single memory, can so define them.

However, it is interesting that we don’t get to see Kirk’s most painful moment. What would it be? (Other than this movie, of course.) It could be something deep in his past that we’ve never seen or heard of before, but it also might have been skipped over because we’ve seen him face his worst moments already: the death of Spock, the loss of his ship, his dead son. Edith Keeler, perhaps?

I have no idea what we’re supposed to get out of this movie, and I’m not sure the filmmakers did either. It’s tough to say if it’s better for a film to have no plot or a bad plot—talk about a no-win scenario—but I think I would still take TFF over TMP, if only because stuff happens and there’s more characterization, even if some of it is wildly off the mark and there are scenes that make me groan. They’re both bad movies, but I can at least enjoy parts of TFF and I like some of the jokes. Plus, it’s shorter. Star Trek V suffers additionally from being sandwiched between parts IV and VI, but there’s some small comfort in knowing that the best is yet to come.

Maybe it’s better to just avoid TFF altogether, but as Kirk said, “I need my pain,” if only to appreciate the heights of the series even more. When you see how easy it is for a film to go wrong, even with promising material, it’s practically a miracle when they get it right.

Eugene’s Rating: Warp 3

Background Information

Star Trek V is pretty much universally acknowledged as the nadir of the franchise. Not only was it the absolute worst piece of garbage to ever bear the Star Trek logo, but it debuted right after the first season of TNG, which many fans already felt disillusioned and disappointed by. Even Roddenberry lamented its place in the canon, and the movie was both a financial and critical failure.

The stars sort of aligned to create this masterpiece of dreck. For one, it was in development during the 1988 Writer’s Guild of America strike, so both pre-production and shooting wound up severely curtailed and the budget was extremely tight. Scenes often had only minutes instead of hours to set up. Extras were reused, so that the same guys run through the gates of Paradise over and over again. Entire setpieces, like the corridors, were recycled from TNG, which was filming at the next door Paramount lot.

Two, the unbelievable success of Star Trek IV made the studios think that success was all about comedy, and demanded another comic masterpiece. The writers were asked to shoehorn in humor wherever possible, and make scenes sillier.

Three, Industrial Light and Magic wasn’t available for the effects (they made a much smarter choice and worked on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Ghostbusters II), and the replacement company did a dreadful job. Everything looks noticeably tackier and unpolished. With only three months to complete the effects instead of the usual six, compositing was replaced with rear projection, which was faster, cheaper, and uglier. In fact, the climactic chase scene at the end was intended to be much longer and more involved, but the whole thing had to be axed because the effects looked that bad. Also left on the cutting room floor was a battle sequence in which Kirk fights animated rock monsters. They couldn’t afford six, but even just the one they got looked so god-awful they didn’t include it in the final cut of the movie.

Lastly, and perhaps the most telling weakness, was that William Shatner was involved creatively. His first draft of the story was called “An Act of Love” and it was essentially an indictment of televangelists, represented by Sybok. In the first version, Spock and McCoy both join Sybok against Kirk. Nimoy absolutely refused to allow it–he said Spock would never turn on Kirk, not after what Kirk did for him in Star Trek III, and ultimately Kelley agreed. (Funny that they both turned on Kirk, eh?) Shatner wanted them to meet Satan instead of god at the center of the universe, but Roddenberry was vehemently opposed to this idea. Then Shatner wanted Eric Van Lustbader to do the screenplay but negotiations fell through when Lustbader’s fee ($1 million) was too rich for Paramount’s blood. He was at least able to entice Harve Bennett back to the franchise, but Bennett felt the script wasn’t adventurous enough and worried that moviegoers would be offended by the anti-religious message. The Satan figure was turned into a greedy alien instead, and everyone was pleased but Roddenberry, who felt the whole god search was a bad idea about to be done poorly. (He further objected to god being the Western Judeo-Christian god, constantly referred to as “he.”)

Once filming began, Shatner’s stubbornness as a director lead to a ballooning budget, a series of minor catastrophes, and some embarrassing gaffes. Set pieces became monstrously expensive: the bridge alone cost $250,000, while the city of Paradise cost half a million dollars. The teamsters, who drove the trucks, went on strike and non-union drivers were hired. In retaliation one production van full of camera equipment exploded, and the scabs had be escorted by police in the dead of night. The desert scenes were filmed at the Mojave desert, but the 110 degree heat led to extreme exhaustion and at one point a park ranger had to rescue a stranded crew. In one mistake, Kirk, McCoy, and Spock fly up on the turboshaft on rocket boots and the decks go up in number to 78. (The Enterprise only has 23 decks and they’re numbered in reverse, which production designer Hermann Zimmerman pointed out to the Shat, to no avail.)

By the end, the movie was over budget, looked awful, and ran at least 15 minutes too long. Bennett was tasked with cutting the film down (which Shatner resented), but test audiences still thought the movie was too long, and more scenes were cut, giving it a disjointed feel. It premiered with higher opening weekend numbers than even Star Trek IV, but those numbers quickly tanked and the movie was only in theaters for ten weeks.

The franchise seemed to be at an end. Harve Bennett tried to develop a prequel, but the studios eventually nixed it and agreed to do one last movie with the original cast.

Best Line: KIRK: What does God need with a starship?

Other Favorite Quotes: MCCOY (on Spock): I liked him better before he died!

MCCOY: “You’ll have a great time, Bones.” “You’ll enjoy your shore leave.” “You’ll be able to relax.” You call this relaxing? I’m a nervous wreck. If I’m not careful I might end up talking to myself.

Worst Lines: ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT…

McCOY: We were speculating … “Is God really out there?”
KIRK: Maybe he’s not out there, Bones. Maybe he’s right here … in the human heart.

Trivia: The god-alien is named Sha Ka Ree because they had hoped Sean Connery would play the part of Sybok. Lucky for Connery, he was busy filming Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

One deleted scene involves Sulu and Chekov visiting Mt. Rushmore, which has added a black woman.

Levi’s jeans get a credit at the end because the trio wears them in the opening hiking scenes.

Nichelle Nichols is an accomplished singer and dancer, but her vocals during the fan dance were overdubbed. She was, as you may have guessed, not pleased.

About Torie Atkinson & Eugene Myers

TORIE ATKINSON is a NYC-based law student (with a focus on civil rights and economic justice), proofreader, sometime lighting designer, and former Tor.com blog editor/moderator. She watches too many movies and plays too many games but never, ever reads enough books.
EUGENE MYERS has published short fiction in a variety of print and online zines as E.C. Myers. He is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and a member of the writing group Altered Fluid. When he isn’t watching Star Trek, he reads and writes young adult fiction. His first novel, Fair Coin, is available now from Pyr.

44 Comments

1.NomadUK

Posted November 3, 2011 at 8:18 AM

You know, for once, when I say I have nothing much to add, I really do have nothing much to add.

Really.

2.DemetriosX

Posted November 3, 2011 at 11:05 AM

It’s amazing how much of this movie I’ve forgotten/suppressed. All I really remember is the trio in Yosemite, “What does God need with a starship?” and the fan dance. Oh God the fan dance. That was probably the low point of the entire TOS crew run. Lower than “Brain and brain! What is brain?” Lower than “The Alternative Factor”. Yes, lower even than Kirk and Alexander playing horsie. (Not to mention that it was 20 years too late.)

Shatner’s contribution to the abortion of a script is also the ultimate proof that all those TekWar books were ghosted. I never read them, so I can’t say if it was really Ron Goulart or not, but I can’t believe that anyone associated with this, this… thing could ever produce something publishable.

3.DemetriosX

Posted November 3, 2011 at 11:07 AM

Oh, I forgot I wanted to mention that the thing I most remember of going to see this is that the friend I went to see it with lost his wallet in the theater after withdrawing 200 dollars. I’m still not sure what the worst thing to happen to him that evening was.

Warp 3, really Eugene? I l know you’ve been under the weather lately but you might want to dial back on those meds. This film was uterly unwatchable. It was painful to sit through and the only original cast film I have watched only once.
I’ve tried to watch things for the re-watch including Spock’s Brain & The Way To Eden but this one I am glad to miss.

5.Lemnoc

Posted November 3, 2011 at 12:01 PM

Overdone and half-baked.

I think Torie is too generous to Shatner.

In a few years from the making of this film, the Shat would publish his ungenerous and ego-maniacal Star Trek Memories, which completely dismissed the second tier cast (and enraged those actors personally), in which he would reveal his belief that ST was about Kirk and *only* about Kirk. That might have been true of the OS as it aired, certainly seemed to be the thrust of the first season, but this is years and movies on. Also around this time, Shat would make his famous diss of Trekkies on SNL.

That sort of dismissal of the material and the fan base glares all over this film, making cringeworthy jokes of the “drama” and characters. And we know this is Shat’s way of seeing the work at this moment in his career.

I recall reading in some trivia somewhere that an early draft of the script had Kirk going it alone after being betrayed by his shipmates. Nimoy and Kelly protested that IIRC because it diminished their roles. But again it shows something about how Shatner saw the role of Kirk.

His fingerprints are all over this crime scene.

6.NomadUK

Posted November 3, 2011 at 12:01 PM

I mean, really, ‘Spock’s Brain’ and ‘The Way to Eden’ are high art compared to this thing. Heck, I’d sit through multiple viewings of my personal least favourite, ‘That Which Survives’, rather than go through this one again.

7.Lemnoc

Posted November 3, 2011 at 12:04 PM

From the standpoint of casting, couldn’t they have found *somebody* who at least could have plausibly looked like a Vulcan and a sibling of Spock? The beard, Luckinbill’s hairline—just how many emotionally unstable kids did Sarek conceive?

I recall Martin Landau was an early choice to play the role of Spock in TOS—he would have made an interesting choice here.

I also think that Nicholas Meyer cast David Warner in ST VI to apologize for the poor man, a very talented actor, being shived into ST V. (An image burned onto my cotrex like a Ceti Aplha elle is Warner with his arm around the Romulan protitute’s shoulder. (Don;t tell me she’s an ambassdore she doesn’t look or act like one.)

There was a fan-produced MST3K treatment of this movie circulating around fandom a while back. I have a videotape of it, and it is, for the record, the only possible way to watch this movie. Even with the aid of alcohol.

11.Weirman

Posted November 3, 2011 at 1:14 PM

Oh, it hurts.

I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet but Shatner actually had plans for the trio to eventually journey through hell, complete with rivers of fire and demons. When you look at the final film as compared to his original vision, then it might warrant a higher rating than 1. But reading that (in one of his books, maybe it was Star Trek Memories) pretty much made it impossible for me to give Shatner any sympathy for this disaster.

The one thing I can say is that the cast really did their best with the dreck they got. Even the slightly good lines (in comparison to the bad) are painful to hear or think about. I can’t imagine how terrible it was to actually say them.

I would rather watch TMP with my eyelids taped open than see or hear this one again. I don’t think it even deserves an Impulse Engines rating.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

12.Ludon

Posted November 3, 2011 at 2:02 PM

When this movie opened in theaters, I did not know the term ‘Mary Sue’. When it was explained to me I thought “Oh. You mean like Kirk in The Final Frontier?” Kirk’s logic exposes the fake God. Kirk knows what’s best for his well being. Kirk is the best.

In the discussion of The Motion Picture, I talked about the beginning of the film feeling like it was from a different movie. Unfortunately, this beginning – which I did like – ended up having its memory dragged into the gutter with the rest of the movie. Sybok’s ability ends up coming off as more of a crutch or emotional drug than as an emotional cure. Though, there is nothing wrong with that – that idea could be developed into an interesting episode. But, have we seen it before such as in Mudd’s Women?

And the name Sybok. To me that sounds and reads like a word/name that marketing would come up with. “Lace up your Syboks and run for it!” I know I’m being unfair with this one but the name is what it is to me. Other science fiction has played with the idea of names carrying unwanted baggage. Alien Nation did it with Sikes’ name sounding to the Tenctonese like two words translating back to english as ‘excrement’ and ‘cranium’ – ‘shithead’. And in real life there are names that do the same thing. I once saw on a check a last name spelled ‘Somschidt’. (Say it and you’ll understand it.) But what is it about the name Sybok that bothers me? It’s too close to the name Reebok for me to not make a connection and that connection is just one of many problems I have with this movie.

Maybe I’m being harsh on this one as I’m commenting on it based on memories. The Final Frontier, like The Phantom Menace and NeverEnding Story II, is a movie that I refuse to own a copy of or go out of my way to see again.

YAY! “You would fight me for a field full of empty holes?” “What other kinds of holes are there?”

And yeah, the Rocks song is a thing of beauty.

On a related note I must also observe that I actually read the novelization of this trainwreck, and bizarrely enough it actually made more sense than the movie version–in no small part because Sybok’s mother was described in the novel as a “Vulcan priestess”, not a “Vulcan princess”.

15.EngineersMate

Posted November 4, 2011 at 3:16 AM

No way is this better than TMP. TMP is watchable. This isn’t, not more than once. Thank goodness it wasn’t part of an ‘arc’ story, like the trilogy that preceded it, and can be safely ignored.

16.CaitieCait

Posted November 4, 2011 at 9:49 AM

ST V: the proof that I was right to view the franchise as dead after IV.

@ 2 DemetriosX
Oh man, I feel so bad for your friend. If only he had lost his wallet before buying his ticket…

I have to say, though, “What would God need with a starship?” is one of my absolute favorite lines in all of Star Trek. So at least it gave us that.

@ 4 bobsandiego
Yeah that rating shocked me, too.

@ 5 Lemnoc
Oh I don’t deny that Shatner was (and may still be) a total douche, but I don’t think the flaws of the film are due to a single-minded focus on Kirk. It’s just as much a film about Spock, and McCoy plays a substantial role as well. Kirk may be the one who figures everything out (but he always does), but Spock fights Sybok, too, and I didn’t feel it was overblown in the way that so many have painted it. The movie is terrible for other reasons, mainly in that it aims to be a character story that says absolutely nothing interesting about the characters.

@ 6 NomadUK
I’ve seen this twice now. I hope to never see it again.

@ 7 Lemnoc
Ooh, I really like Martin Landau. I think they were mostly looking for a cheaper Sean Connery. I mean, the Romulan chick is a poor man’s Tia Carerre.

@ 8 bobsandiego
Oh David Warner… why are you in this movie. (Oh right, because he’s British, which means he’ll star in anything that pays him.)

@13 Eugene
Sorry, TMP is better than TFF. I couldsit down with an edit deck and turn TMP inot a mediocre episode, (i.e. chop out starship porn, pointless reaction shots etc.) however TFF cannot be chopped or edited into a mediocre story. I fails over and over. TFF is nothing but de-orbiting junk,
I’ll share one fo the reasons this was so terribly disappointing,. I think it was Vonda Mcintyer who came up with a great Vulcan relative for Spock. A cousin who desperatly wants to feel emotions, but can’t. He seeks out adventure hoping to have a taste of what Spock has but rejects, He would have been a much more intersting character than Sybok the manipulator.

Yeah, some things not even Joel/Mike and the Bots (or fan renditions thereof) can save. You’ll notice I haven’t actually watched even THAT version for years now. ;>

And mind you, the novelization wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but it definitely made better sense. I’m given to understand that movie novelizations are generally always based on earlier versions of scripts, which gives me scary thoughts about how the version of the script that produced the novelization got turned into the version that actually made it to the theaters.

21.Lemnoc

Posted November 4, 2011 at 3:12 PM

I can still recall my initial reactions to this film when it was released in theaters.

I cringed when Spock showed up in jet boots. Squirmed when Kirk fell from Half Dome and struck nothing on the way down until he was within a nose breadth of the ground, then rescued. Was deeply embarrassed by the cloying campfire love-in, the way you’d be terribly embarrassed and ashamed for your drunken uncle pawing at the children at Thanksgiving. And we’re not even, what?, ten minutes into the film.

TMP never generated anything like that in my psyche.

22.Johnny Pez

Posted November 4, 2011 at 4:57 PM

I have to side with bobsandiego on this one. TMP is often dull, but it isn’t bad. TFF is bad.

23.glorbes

Posted November 4, 2011 at 5:26 PM

TMP has the edge because it introduces the new Enterprise, and really did have some nifty (if wildly inconsistent) effects. Final Frontier really is awful, but it is NOT boring, and in some ways feels the most like an episode of the original show…albeit a really bad episode. My brother once said that watching Final Froniter was like watching a really long beer commercial…not sure what he meant by it,but somehow it feels like an accurate assessment.

Atelier Lana (artist of the must-see “Star Trekker” manga series) already said it best: “A film so bad that audience members had to be carried out on stretchers.”

26.DeepThought

Posted November 9, 2011 at 3:40 PM

Try as I might, and despite having seen it at least three times (yes, really), I fear I have basically no memory of anything that happened in the middle part of this movie.

Now in the most recent screening I was actually asleep, but still.

27.Dep1701

Posted November 14, 2011 at 11:51 PM

Late to this one ( as usual ) but I will add my 2 to 10 cents worth.

I remember being in the hospital with one of my recurring bouts of asthma before this film came out. Someone brought me a copy of the tabloid National Enquirer which published an exclusive synopsis of a ‘leaked’ script for Trek V. I read the synopsis with amusement, taking anything that appears in a tabloid paper with a grain of salt. Imagine my shock when I saw the movie a few months later and everything that appeared in the synopsis was dead-on accurate. From Spock’s jet boots, to his half-brother, to the search for God… it was all there.

When I first read the article, I was sure it was the half-baked musings of some hack journalist trying to sell some papers to Trekkies. I thought, this is so ludicrous it can’t be real. If only I had been right. I got to see the “film” the night before it premiered, as one of my friends was friends with a theatre manager. They were doing their test run of the film to catch any flaws in the print which could be rectified ( tears, broken sprockets, weak splices, etc… ). I had been looking forward ( with some trepidation ) to this screening for weeks, but an hour before we left for the theatre, I came down with a badly upset stomach and a case of diarrhea. Being the loyal and determined Trekkie I am, I downed half a bottle of Pepto Bismol and other stomach medicines, and forged ahead. By the end of the movie, I was wishing I had stayed home. If my stomach had not been upset before, it certainly would have been by the end of the movie. When the lights came up all of my friends looked at me for my reaction. The look on my face must have said it all, because I heard one of them say to the other, “Uh oh, David does NOT look happy”.

Over the years, I have mellowed a bit, mainly because Star Trek VI helped to repair some of the damage, and occasionally I do watch this movie, as I have some sort of perverse fascination with bad cinema. I often sit there and watch it, trying to fathom just what the thought processes were that were going on behind the scenes, and who ( other than Shatner ) thought that any of this was a good idea.

The one thing I will give this movie credit for is Jerry Goldsmith’s wonderful score. He wrote some simply beautiful pieces for this movie. His theme for “The Mountain” ( and it’s subsequent more wistful arrangements in the cues titled “Not Alone” and “Cosmic thoughts” ) is not only a stirring and emotional piece of “Star Trek” music, but it is a wonderfully moving piece when heard outside of the film. It is a personal favorite, and I was delighted and excited when the complete soundtrack was released last year.

One interesting theory I’ve read is that this movie kind of works if you watch it with the idea that it is one of Kirk’s fever dreams. Think about it; his ship isn’t working and all of his compatriots turn on him. It just needed a scene at the end where Kirk wakes up in a cold sweat, and says, “Thank God It was only a dream!”

If only it had been.

28.Mercurio

Posted November 21, 2011 at 2:45 PM

Eugene, you are a generous soul. I never, ever felt ashamed of being a ST fan–until the day I watched this movie at the theater. What utter dreck! What humiliation for the actors! Scotty and Uhura! Row, row, your boat! The shame is rushing back…

Great insights as always, folks.

29.etomlins

Posted November 29, 2011 at 3:30 PM

#10: “There was a fan-produced MST3K treatment of this movie circulating around fandom a while back.”

There’s something a bit more official now; “Rifftrax”, Michael J. Nelson’s spinoff of Mystery Science Theater 3000, released its take on Star Trek V a while ago: http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/star-trek-v-final-frontier It’s just him and Kevin Murphy doing it. There are other Star Trek Rifftrax including one for Star Trek II (Nelson, Murphy, and Bill Corbett), Star Trek VI (all three again), Star Trek Generations (just Nelson and Murphy), and the J. J. Abrams Star Trek (all three.) It should be mentioned that the Rifftrax philosophy is that any movie can be riffed, even if it’s a great movie; they even released a “Rifftrack” to Casablanca a while ago.

30.Dep1701

Posted January 31, 2012 at 6:35 PM

I just recently ran across this on you tube. Something like this would have helped the movie quite a bit, but it would not have made up for the shoddy storytelling, embarassing defiling of the characters, or the blatant disregard for continuity with the original series, but it would have made the FX sequences bearable to watch:

This is a montage, but once you look at this one you should check out his other clips ( especially his rather spectacular looking rejected ‘barrier’ sequence ). Even in their unpolished states, they are light years ahead of what Bran Ferren provided for the original film.

When I first saw this film I actually kind of liked it…at least more than my friends. It’s not my fault, though. It’s J.M. Dillard’s fault. You see, the novelization came out a week before the movie, and being a 14 year old star trek geek snatched it up and tore through it. The book is actually a lot better than the movie since (1) the story’s more developed and (2) there’s no bad special effects or terrible delivery in my imagination.

Of course going back and watching it 24 years later, having forgotten everything about it and the book based on it, I can truly appreciate how god awful it really is. There are two things I still really like about it, though. First, I still enjoy Lawrence Luckinbill’s performance. I just feel bad that he’s totally wasted it on this material. Second, I really love Shatner’s direction of the scene in the observation lounge where Sybok probes McCoy and Spock’s inner pain. The way it used sets off to the side and lighting instead of cutting to a separately filmed scene is really cool and kind of theatrical.

But other than that I admit that it’s just terrible, and every time I see Uhura molesting Scotty I die a little inside.

It’s been awhile, but I’ve never managed to not enjoy watching Star Trek V. I can forgive a lot when it’s accompanied by good humor and an ambitious science fiction premise that doesn’t revolve around violence and destruction.

34.glorbes

Posted September 16, 2013 at 10:59 PM

Watched this with a buddy last night. I enjoyed it more that I thought I would. Its still a cheesy piece of crap, and by far the worst of the original series cast films…but I stand by the assessment that its somehow enjoyable despite its flaws. Maybe its because I can’t help but compare it to Into Darkness…and suddenly Final Frontier seems like a light-hearted picture that has earned some goodwill.

35.monoceros4

Posted September 18, 2013 at 10:22 AM

@34 (glorbes): You know, I think you’re right. I can imagine popping in Star Trek V some lazy evening. When I watched it with my partner some years ago he pointed out something I had to agree with, that the movie had more of the feel of a Star Trek episode than many other Trek movies. It tries at least to grapple with some big concepts in the manner of a good TOS episode. It tries and fails hilariously, to be sure, but at least it’s not just some half-baked summer blockbuster lurching from one action sequence to another.

Maybe it’d be more accurate to say that Star Trek V feels not so much like a TOS episode but like a TOS fanfic. It has that imitative quality of feeling cobbled together from bits of famous episodes: you’ve got the god who isn’t really a god from “Who Mourns Adonais?”; you’ve got everyone abandoning Kirk to get in touch with their feelings from “This Side of Paradise”. The unexpected introduction of a long-lost and never before mentioned brother to Spock, too, is a fanficcish sort of trick. There’s even some obligatory “shipping” between Scotty and Uhura.

Star Trek V is a classic example of a film which is famous for being bad on the Internet, rather than a film that is actually bad. Much like Kirk is famous for being a “bad” captain, William Shatner is famous for being a “bad” actor, and TOS is famous for being a “bad” series. Star Trek V has limitations which may cause it to fall short from being a great ST film, but it is certainly better than Star Trek VI, for example.

Not that reality has much chance to compete (at least in the short run) with silly syllogisms like “the even numbers movies are the best,” or with SNL-style Star Trek parodies, which are much better known to people under the age of 50 than the original material. The fact that the parodies sound about as much like Star Trek as Dana Carvey’s impression of George H.W. Bush really sounds like George H.W. Bush scarcely matters–ask someone what GHWB sounds like and they’ll think of Dana Carvey, 98% of the time.

37.monoceros4

Posted September 19, 2013 at 1:45 PM

@36 (Kevin): Star Trek V has limitations which may cause it to fall short from being a great ST film, but it is certainly better than Star Trek VI, for example.

Now let’s not get carried away. Star Trek VI may be somewhat creaky, weakened with too many plot conveniences and featuring a mystery solved in too facile a manner, but it’s hardly an awful movie. Perhaps I’m somewhat better-disposed to it than I should be because it’s the only Trek movie, not counting Abrams’s unfortunate contributions, I’ve seen on the big screen. On the other hand Star Trek V contains a few too many truly ridiculous moments for me to take entirely seriously. It’s sort of a more ambitious “The Way to Eden”.

I do think that _Star Trek VI_ is the worst of the orignal six ST films, but I’m not sure I would go as far as to call it “awful.” Though it does have some awful scenes.

39.dep1701

Posted September 21, 2013 at 6:25 AM

@36 “Star Trek V is a classic example of a film which is famous for being bad on the Internet, rather than a film that is actually bad. ”

Not to start a flame war, but I must heartily disagree. Star Trek V IS a bad movie. Piss poor effects, bad puns and jokes, characters acting completely out of character ( Scotty and Uhura romance? Naked fan dancing? Sulu’s never landed a shuttle without a tractor beam…in 20 years? Everyone in the crew turns against Kirk with a little mental pain relief?
and – some may disagree – Kirk’s ridiculously over the top “SHOOT HIM!!!!” ), a half-brother there’s never been a hint of of …EVER, jet boots for Chrissake! The list goes on and on.

I’m a hardcore original series fan. I’m 50 years old and saw the series first run. I grew up with it in syndication. I watched the animated series. I read the books. I saw all of the films in the theatre multiple times ( even this one ). While my opinion of it has softened a bit over the years, to me it is STILL the worst of all the TOS cast movies ( and that includes the first Motion Picture, which is still disliked by most of the fan community some 30 years later ). At least in Trek VI, most of the crew is proactive, works as a team and keeps a shred of dignity.

of course, YMMV, and you are entitled to your opinion, but frankly I was embarrassed to be a fan when “The Final Frontier” came out ( see post number 27 for my backstory on that day ).

No flame war. Mainly I stand by my comment @33: I’ve never managed to not enjoy watching Star Trek V. Some part of it may be first seeing it in theaters at age 15–I also have an unreasonable attachment to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade–but that isn’t all. I’ll say up front that it’s been 8-10 years since I looked at the film. But.

ST5 is conceptually far more ambitious than Star Trek IV, which despite its half-hearted environmental message is an amiable film that studiously avoids pushing the characters or challenging the audience, which was job one for TOS. Instead, ST5 does what Roddenberry wanted Trek to do: put people first, and deal with human conflicts against a science fiction background.

ST5 is about the yearning for connection, and emotional pain, that underlies the need for belief, and how this can be exploited by charismatic leaders and distorted when projected on grandiose external subjects. Like many great TOS episodes before it, ST5 pulls back the curtain to reveal the lie at the center of the illusion. Do not look for salvation in other people’s promises, it says (quite boldly)–what you need is right in front of you. It’s in everyday friendship. It’s “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

ST5 has more to say than most of the Star Trek films, and quite a lot that’s worth thinking about. Could it have benefited from more time, more money, and a hard rewrite? Of course. But I would argue that it is truer to the spirit of TOS than any of the films, even The Motion Picture.

I think people are put off by the tone of the film, which is unabashedly sentimental, and playful to point of pushing the humor it carries over from ST4 (and TOS episodes such as “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and “Tribbles”) into knowing absurdism. It is easily the most emotionally vulnerable entry in the Trek film franchise, which may embolden those who like to whale on it, usually with some ad hominem attacks against Shatner thrown in. The tone doesn’t come from the sloppiness of the film, but from its choices, which history shows to be mistaken if the goal was to maximize box office receipts.

For all that, the film is obviously suffused with love for Star Trek and its characters. It’s courageous, and I respond to it on that level. If the longevity of Star Trek comes from its heart (which I believe), ST5 wears its heart on its sleeve, under a sign that says “Punch me right here, haters.” What I observe is that even many people who aren’t Star Trek haters are embarrassed by this, and become quick to make apologies for it. Well, I’m not afraid to say it–I love Star Trek V. It gives me more of what I want from Star Trek than I get from either IV or VI, or from the first two seasons of TNG for that matter, which were playing at the time on TV. I still remember feeling happy and grateful as I walked out of the theater. Maybe to those who were born later this debate just seems academic, and ST5 just feels like an original cast movie that was less than it could have been.

41.dep1701

Posted September 23, 2013 at 5:10 PM

@40

Fair enough. I can respect and understand your feelings. In fact, it’s intriguing to me that sometimes I can watch it and I’m ready to forgive ALMOST all of it’s faults, then other times I watch it and I’m ready to hurl things at the screen. I can’t think of any other ( original series ) Trek film that provokes the same wildly vacillating reactions in me. I too can get the warm fuzzies when watching this movie…it’s just that…gosh darn it…I wish it was a better film.

There are times when I watch TFF that I’m reminded of those simply awful Hanna Barbera “Legends Of The Superheroes” TV specials that reunited Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin, and played the characters for cheap laughs ( I know that seems like a strange complaint considering the original source material for those interpretations of the characters, but the television series had a tongue in cheek approach that was completely missing from the 1970’s specials ). They were cheaply produced, poorly written and embarrassing to watch.

I know it may be hard to understand what I’m trying to convey with this comparison, but this movie felt like a huge step backward. The first time I watched “The Final Frontier” I often felt as though I was watching a cheaply produced T.V. reunion movie, written by people who had only passing knowledge of the original series and were painting many of the characters in broad strokes based on the viewing of a few episodes; Kirk is the soulful hero, McCoy is a wisecraker, Spock is logical and puzzled by human emotions, Scotty always has tech trouble, and the other three…well, they’re just there as set dressing and comic relief. It was almost as though there had been no previous films. The sets were cheap, the effects were often on a par with ( or below ) the original series, many of the jokes were at the expense of the character’s dignity, and there was this soapy twist of the never before heard of long-lost relative.

I do understand your affection for the film…I really do. I agree that with some extra time and decent story / script doctoring it could have been a really good movie. I think if the “Spock’s half brother” bit could have been dropped and he was just a Vulcan mystic that Spock had a huge overpowering respect for, Sybok would have been more palatable. If half the stupid jokes and puns could have been lost ( “Hold your horse, Captain” immediately comes to mind ), and the humor had not been at the expense of the characters ( neck pinching a horse…really? ) the movie would be better. I also feel that if Shatner had been able to judge and direct his own acting performance more objectively the movie would be far more enjoyable.

Still, I appreciate your intelligent discussion and defense of the film and your feelings about it. I always appreciate a fan who can make a point without insults and name-calling, which seems to have become the rule rather than the exception on many other Trek websites.

Maybe I’ll feel that way when I get to the film again. I’m watching TOS in sequence right now, almost at the end of season one, with the general plan to proceed through the whole corpus in order of first air date. ST5, however, always felt to me like the cast and producers laughing at themselves, not being laughed at by unfriendlies or strangers. This isn’t the original series Star Trek film that doesn’t give a shit about the cast–that’s Star Trek VI, where no one gets anything interesting to do except Kirk, who is made into a jackass as a cheap foil for the purposes of the story. Marc Cushman puts it really well in his book, These Are the Voyages, TOS: Season One, talklng about the way Kirk is portrayed in the first Klingon episode, “Errand of Mercy”:

And, for the benefit of the story, Kirk is portrayed as overtly macho and too quick to jump into a shoving match with the Klingons. Normally, the Captain is of a cooler head than this, and smarter. No wonder the Klingon in “The Trouble with Tribbles,” who heard tales of Kirk’s conduct on Organia, refers to him as a “swaggerning slime devil with delusions of godhood.”

Kirk’s portrayal in ST6 is that, times eleven. The entirety of Kirk and McCoy’s sequences on the prison planet, for example, are every bit as absurd as the most absurd thing that happens in ST5. The difference is that actors are telling you the whole time with their performances “We know. We’re not really trying. You can’t laugh at us, because we’re taking no emotional risks.” The fact that the special effects are more polished is of no solace to me whatsoever.

I’m sorry, but this movie deserves no sympathy. It’s not only by far the worst piece of Star Trek in franchise history it’s one of the worst movies made OF ANY KIND.

This sentiment that it had a good idea is ludicrous. What about finding God (as a scary creature on a planet) is related to science fiction?

All the criticisms of Shatner’s megalomania mentioned previously are completely true. The acting is the worst ever. The singing, the sets, the visual effects, the dialogue, the bad jokes, the unicorn, the awful depiction of the Klingons (this after a full season of infinitely more developed Next Generation Klingons) and do we even need to mention the fan dance??

I’m inclined to agree with the worst assessments of this piece of celluloid. Roddenberry had been wanting to do “Kirk meets God” since before TMP and his preachy-atheism is all over this turkey. Religion just enslaves people’s minds, God is an advanced alien con artist, insane, or a child. It’s like bad Gnosticism.

What interested me, though, was the inclusion of Spock’s half-sibling leading a secessionist movement. Jacqueline Lichtenberg, the author of Kraith, has long claimed that Roddenberry had copies of her work in his office as early as 1979, and he was asking people to read them. Elements of Kraith turn up every now and then in the films, and this is one of them. In Kraith, Spock has a half-sister, T’Uriamne, by Sarek’s first wife (never described except that she was a full Vulcan). T’Uriamne is a bigot who never forgave Sarek for marrying Amanda, and who fears “contamination” of Vulcan culture and values by the many other races living on Vulcan. Her secessionist movement, introduced as a proposal before the Guardian Council, is a demand that Vulcan withdraw from the Federation for its own protection. Now that’s a movie I’d like to see.